The Concept of Carnival as an Angle of Interpretation

Jens Aage Doctor

(summary for pages 410-19)

This interpretation of Andersen's fairy tales is based on
Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of carnival as presented in his
famous book on Rabelais. Characteristic features of carnival are, for
example, materialism, inversion of any dominant
hierarchy and degradation of a given order's highest
estimated values. They are introduced and illuminated through an
initial interpretation of a record in Andersen's diary (May 26th,
1841), where some Hungarian millers expose their uncovered behinds to
the passengers on board a ship on the Danube.

Thus prestige-conveying abstract studies and academic garrulity
are being degraded in "Simple Simon". The two
brothers mount the high horse and are qualified by their learned heads
alone. Simple Simon sits close to the earth and has, so to speak, his
riches between his legs: "The billy-goat is mine, and he can carry
me". His cultured brothers fail to profit by their learning,
because they have never confronted it with that concrete reality of
which Simple Simon has a most certain sense, namely the material
bodily lower stratum (i.e. Bakhtin's designation of the bottom
as an organic seat of decomposition, digestion, defecation and sex). So
the plot leads to a thorough carnivalistic inversion. By
Simple Simon's victory the hierarchy of current value is turned
topsyturvy: the heads are humiliated and the material
bodily lower stratum accordingly elevated. Whereas the two
brothers refine themselves beyond matter, Simple Simon's road to
the princess is bordered with some unpopular but indisputably earthly
truths; his humble discoveries call forth the automatic contempt of his
arrogant brothers, but - being samples from the material bodily
lower stratum - they inspire him. Thus the dead crow gives his
goat-ride its perspective: that of death. And with the worn, defective
wooden shoe degradation has taken us almost to the ground:
bodily to the foot, socially to the working class and
its toilsome, heavy march on earth. These two first discoveries are in
the process of decomposition and so they point to
indifference, which is the starting point as well as the end
of every organic structure. They - and all that lives - revert
to earth. With the third find, mud from the ditch, we are eventually in
touch with earth itself: "'the finest sort', Simple Simon
said, and then he filled his pocket". Thou shalt become earth
again: that is the wooer's message to his chosen bride! In
carnival, however, death isn't a terrible termination of life,
death doesn't lead out of - or beyond - earthly life, but into it:
as a necessary condition of the renewal of generations. To carry out
wooing as a gastronomic affair is the carnivalistic coup of this tale,
for so the point of view is shifted from the greatest cycle of
reproduction (the renewal of generations) to the smallest (the
body's daily supply of food). So it becomes a meal in commemoration
of death's importance to life's perpetual recreation.

Through its imaginative strength and presence of mind the
dialogue between Simple Simon and the princess bears witness to the
liberating linguistic potential of carnival. This is also the case in
"Dad's Always Right". Here capitalist economy is
degraded; its guiding principle, buy cheap/sell dear, is
inverted and so buy dear/sell cheap becomes the main pattern
for all the bargains until the bottom is reached and the capital is
nothing but a sack of rotten apples for the pigs. The rotten apples
mark indifference and signify (like the mud in "Simple
Simon") the turning-point of the story. For the tale does not stop
here, where everything is lost and the peasant's failure is just as
evident as is the success of the two wealthy Englishmen. It rises again
in all its glory: we are told the same story once again in every detail
and yet it is anything but boring! On the contrary: it has become twice
as exciting. The more badly Dad fares with his bargains, the more
prolific is Mum's enthusiastic appreciation of her dear
husband's genius and thoughtfulness.

Carnival is perceptible on all sides of Andersen's fairy
tales. It is a valuable material counterbalance to the spirituality of
the dominating cultural ideology that normally applies to his writings.
It extends the selective realism of his genre pictures and is an
approach to his repressions ("The Shepherdess and the
Chimney-Sweep"). In carnival the relation between the oppressor
and the oppressed is inverted ("Little Claus and Big Claus").
Carnival offers room for Andersen's proletarian experience which is
normally denied; and for his well-known predilection for word-play: it
is linguistic carnival in miniature when a semantic contraction makes
two reciprocally distant meanings meet in a pun. Carnival has given
linguistic pep and artistic stimulation to his most widely read fairy
tales.